Artists' Things, Rediscovering Lost Property from Eighteenth-Century France

Author

Scott; Katie ; Williams; Hannah

Year

2024

Publisher

Getty Publications

Language

English

Pages

ISBN

978-1-60606-865-6

Link

Last Update

17-Jan-2026

Keywords

Art & Art History ; European Studies

Description

Artists are makers of things. Yet it is a measure of the disembodied manner in which we generally think about artists that we rarely consider the everyday things artists themselves owned. And not for lack of evidence. Though most eighteenth-century artists’ Lives are reticent about their subjects’ belongings and refer only briefly to, for example, a lute, or a dressing gown, or a wine glass, wittily to figure some aspect of personality or character,¹ the painters, sculptors, and printmakers of early modern Europe were in fact generally sufficiently rich in stuff to warrant, on death, the drawing up of estate...